Is This The Best App To Grow Your Instagram?

Let's get honest here. For most people who aren't photographers or super famous online Instagram really can be frustrating. If you are like me you have wondered what the magic formula is that makes accounts grow and have been tempted to shut the whole thing down. How do you grow on the platform without just paying for ads? Without following and unfollowing people and instead create a real community. What if you aren’t an amazing photographer, is the platform just for photographers?

A few months back I set out to learn all I could, I was determined to get over my frustration of Instagram and learn how to make it work for my business and turn it into something valuable for my community. I took a few courses on Lynda but they weren’t that helpful. I searched YouTube and discovered two helpful apps. One for editing photos and putting cool filters on them, and the other to arrange how you want your Instagram to be laid out in advance.

Filter App: The first app VSCO is so popular you can actually search Pinterest for “VSCO filters” and examples with settings for your photos show up.

Instagram Layout App: The second app UNUM I have had on my phone for awhile. I didn’t want to give into the pattern of photo, white meme, photo, white meme which everyone seems to be doing. But it does look cool. So I am using this app and for the first time every have a weeks posts planned in advance and I know what they will look like.

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[gdlr_styled_box content_color="#000000" background_type="image" background_image="YOUR_IMAGE_URL" ]This week I learned about a new app I have never heard before it is called Smarthash.

I was listening to a brilliant man, Vincent Haywood, who builds social media platforms for a living (and I am crossing my fingers he will come on my podcast). He shared some amazing information on what tags to use and how to find them. It is called the 10/10/10 Hashtag strategy and I have since seen a ton of articles about it online. It is a strategy of finding a mixture of minimally popular, mildly popular and highly popular hashtags. I took his advice and put together my set of hashtags and immediately my Instagram started to take a turn for the better with a ton of new followers.

But then comes in Smarthash. Smarthash is an app that tracks your hashtags and tells you what tags are generating traffic and which ones are not. So over time you can remove the ones that don’t perform and just use the ones that do! You simply connect the app to your Instagram and it does the counting for you. The result of using this app will mean you will get in front of more people and the right people looking for your content!

The last app I discovered was RiteTag. This app allows you to see the analytics of every tag out there and it will tell you if you should use it or not. However, I didn’t feel it that accurate. For example the top performing tag on my Instagram right now it says that it is a bad hashtag to use. So I would take the information with a grain of salt. [/gdlr_styled_box]

Well I hope that my new findings help you become a better Instagram pro and I hope you come check out my Instagram as I start down the path of trying to make it a beautiful place to visit! And let me know if you follow me and are doing the same! I will follow you back!